AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Feb 12, 2026 1:45 pm How do you experience it when returning to such demonstrations? You say above, "possibly return to it from time to time, and that's it". But what's it? If we are returning to it from time to time, surely that's because its educational value is not being exhausted by multiple encounters. How would you characterize the difference between concentrating on the elastic circles as an imaginative symbol for our inner process, and concentrating on a Rose Cross, the vowel stream, or some other theme (in the latter case, I am assuming you would say the principle of exhausted value no longer applies)?
One may return to an essay and its demos, and benefit from running through the conceptual framework again. This may be educational, for sure, as I have already noted. It's not difficult to check that the limited educational benefit of a demo or game I’ve always been speaking of includes the occasional re-encounter. Again, what it does not include is protracted ad libitum playing.
Besides, one can surely put a personally chosen image at the center of a meditation, including an image extracted from a demo or game like the elastic circles. In that case, the educational value obviously resides not anymore in the character of the demo from which the image has been extracted, but in the meditative quality of the activity. Then, one stops playing with cursors, buttons, apertures, and related conceptual flow. One has stepped in another quality of activity that is not game.
Evidently, the difference is not between concentration on the elastic circles as an imaginative symbol and concentration on the Rose Cross. The difference is between concentrating attention on an imaginative symbol (why not an image of elastic circles), and playing with the game from which the image was extracted. In this latter case, one uses the brain to follow the perceptual-conceptual-emotional transformations proposed by the game rules.